The present invention relates to management of virtual machines (VMs), and more specifically, to a user datagram protocol (UDP) packet migration in a virtual machine (VM) migration.
Providers of cloud computing have the competing tasks of providing desired performance for consumers or end users while also efficiently allocating the resources used to provide services to consumers. The resources may be dynamically allocated by the provider to help achieve these goals. Accordingly, a hardware platform may host a plurality of virtual machines, wherein each virtual machine corresponds to a consumer. Efficient use of the hardware platform resources dictates that the provider place as many virtual machines on the platform as possible without compromising the consumer's use of the virtual machine and experience. It may be desirable to move or migrate a virtual machine from one hardware platform to another to ensure that the customer is not adversely affected by changes in resources for the virtual machines.
Environments based on the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) are able to continue working through a migration because TCP windows are generally longer than the “offline” portion of a virtual machine migration process that suspends all input/output (I/O) and guest processing while a final processing state and other miscellaneous data are sent to a remote host where execution is subsequently resumed. Another network protocol is the user datagram protocol (UDP) which does not include guarantees regarding retry or ordering as compared to TCP.